Hi. I am not sure if what you shared is what Samurai shared with you, but sharing some personal opinions in case useful or interesting. I tend to do the same limited things over and over again because they work and avoid variation. That is, the variation might be fine - I just avoid it in case it causes problems.
I avoid multiple roots in the one puppet. So I would move "Pot" and "cup" into their own artwork file and puppets. They don't need to be in the same file. I would also delete "ICONS". Then put independence on for the remaining puppet (click the crown on). (I would rename it "+PUPPET" if starting from scratch.)
Next, turning on the mesh, its covering the whole area. And there are lots of "fixed" pins all over the place. So I started deleting ones I thought not important. In particular, you have MAIN_TABLE in front of the torso and behind the arms. Great! But I would make it independent because body movements should not distort the table.
Luckily that improved the mask a fair bit!
So something in the table layer is a bit strange, but since it never moves I don't need to care about that any more!
I then deleted all the Fixed pins and sticks from the MAIN_TABLE layer. My goal was to reduce the number of triangles on the screen, which reduces the rendering effort needed by CH. It went from:
to
I moved the origin from the center of the table to where the hands were.
I threw a random image off the web behind and exported a short recording as a GIF. It took a long time to render so going to post this and will follow up with a separate post shortly. I am wondering if can further simplify the puppet and so reduce render time etc. Its taking like 5 mins to render a few seconds.
